Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Because the Trump movement is a cult of personality, with no consistent principles and no concern for truth, many of its boosters don’t care whether the success is real or phony. They don’t care whether the advertised “success” actually happened the way Trump says it did. They don’t care whether the so-called success achieves anything important or lasting. They don’t care if there later turns out to be a corrupt underside. They celebrate peace plans that don’t bring peace, trade deals that don’t enhance trade. The Trump movement exists to glorify Trump, in all his erratic mania. Results in the real world don’t matter.

— David Frum / “Trumps Critics are Falling into an Obvious Trap” / The Atlantic

People talk and talk more
about black holes.

I believe the blackest hole
is the one we inhabit . . .

— Eugenio Montale / “People talk and talk more . . .”

Nobody wants to be where they are, I think. So would it really matter so much if the earth swallows us all?

— Emma Pattee / Tilt 

Why does Trump hate solar and wind energy so passionately? It’s because they’re somewhat outside his or anyone else’s control. A nation that builds its prosperity on oil makes itself a target; a nation that depends on imported oil to survive makes itself a vassal. A nation (say, China) that rapidly builds out its own supply of energy from the sun—energy that can’t be embargoed or effectively attacked, energy that is by its nature decentralized, energy so spread out that no particular bit of it is all that valuable—is a nation that can go its own way. 

America is, by any definition, a rogue nation this morning.

— Bill McKibben / “Just possibly it’s the oil?” / The Crucial Years, on Substack

Our enemy always possesses probable cause.

— Mohammed El-Kurd / Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal

Ambition in fiction is merely the willingness to make mistakes. Mistakes are essential.

— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction

Military action in Venezuela today without allies may prefigure action tomorrow against allies—for example, to invade and annex Greenland. The big strategic idea of the second Trump administration is that major powers are entitled to dominate their neighbors: Russia to dominate Ukraine, China to dominate its neighborhood, and the U.S. to rule over Venezuela, Greenland, Panama, and ultimately Canada—Trump’s desired “51 st state.”

— David Frum / “Trumps Critics are Falling into an Obvious Trap” / The Atlantic

What I’m Listening To: 

Take a look at these hands
The hand speaks
The hand of a government man
Well, I’m a tumbler
Born under punches

— Talking Heads / “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On”